Front Page, February 8, 2017

Front Page

GENEVA LAKE MUST ABIDE

Sixty-Six percent of Lake Geneva’s shoreline falls into the control of Town of Linn. There is no town of Linn, of course. The “town’s” seat of government is called Zenda, where town is used to define an area of 33.8 square miles, instead of an area housing a bunch of residents. Town of Linn takes up about seven percent of Walworth County in land mass. What happens in Town of Linn, by policy and the effects of policies there, reach out and touch every other community around the lake. There can be little doubt about that when any map is consulted that shows the distribution of wealthy land owners bellied up to the water in both sections of Town of Linn.

What’s going on in March (March 24, 2017, to be exact) is vitally important to everyone who lives around the lake. The March 24th meeting is being held to revise the basic plan that was put in place in all communities in Wisconsin to control development. The updating of the current plan, preventing commercial development on lakefront property, is what’s on the table. And the game to open up the lakefront properties for development is afoot. It’s being played in Town of Linn by the members of the town board (where lifting commercial restraints are favored) and right on into the questionably dark and deep corridors of the City of Lake Geneva Municipal building.

Lake Geneva? Say what? Annexation to this commercialization process is leading to steering Geneva Lake’s direction toward that template town called The Dells. The Geneva Inn is seeking to be taken from the rolls of the Town of Linn and delivered like a greasy wrapping paper covered gift, wrenched from the hands of Linn and tossed onto the heated coals of unrestricted Lake Geneva development. The owners of the Geneva Inn have been seething and roiling in anger over their defeat last year, when they were refused in their request to convert much of the Geneva Inn shorefront into a wedding space. Weekend weddings, music and all the hoopla that would go with that conversion, would become part of the punishment residential owners around them would pay for not selling out when the selling out was good. The only way they’ll be able to cover their losses in property values is by likely selling to more developers. And they will come.

Lake Geneva is a pristine jewel just waiting to be rebuilt on a quasi-Dells/Hong Kong/ Las Vegas model. Interesting places to visit but who in hell wants to live there all the time? Across the lands, hills and valleys of America there exist laws that say you cannot favor one developer over another. If the Geneva Inn wins this round of skullduggery, and rotten politicking, then other developers must be allowed to do the same. And the lake will not abide. That clean water (clean enough to drink without additives) will be no more. That sand, dug up under where the Oakfire Restaurant foundations are going in, will be all that’s left of the lake’s virginal qualities. Hummel will be back. The Dells will be coming down. Building predators will come up from Chicago. And they will not be stopped, because the rules that kept them limited to creating structures and businesses adjudged by local citizens to be unacceptable will be no more.

The Lake Geneva Finance Committee is working with a sleight of hand. There is a magic theater in Lake Geneva and another one coming in with special accommodations for the deaf. There’s a third one. Lake Geneva’s finance committee needs to be renamed the Magic Theater for the Stupid. The Lake Geneva City Council will be handed this tarred fast ball right after the city’s magic theater committee gets done approving it. What will the little band of Kordus compliant wandering alderperson’s do? Tent-folding, other than by Flower or Chappell, is likely to be the result.

Meeting of February 7, 2017
City of Lake Geneva Finance Committee

Sooooo, this just happened tonight, February 7, 2017 at the City finance meeting. The discussion of annexation of the Geneva Inn brought out Jim Strauss, owner of the Geneva Shore Report, tonight to make his first public comments in LG in over 3 years. #itsgonnabeinteresting

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